


Leading the littlest among us

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: And A Touch Of Angst, Cassian-centric, Fluff and Feels, Gen, Jyn is off-screen but still in the picture, all the feels, background rebelcaptain, especially those in need, guessing at the languages spoken on Alderaan, inventing language for another world, my headcanon that Cassian would be incredibly protective of children, with a pretty big belly at this juncture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 12:42:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11313624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: No child should be so afraid that they don’t shed a tear even when they’re bleeding.  Cassian knows that much about children (and he remembers sitting in silence, dry-eyed, so many times)...





	Leading the littlest among us

He’s on Lothal, and there are children, some of them younger even than he was when he first threw a rock at a soldier; and there are guns to the fore of them and guns behind them, the tramp of booted feet approaching.  A dark tunnel-mouth gapes under a broken wall, with rank, stinking air issuing in gusts; and he knows it’s probably a sewer but it’s still a way out.  He yells “In there – _in there, **now**_!” and begins grabbing little bodies and pushing them into the broken pipe. “Get in and get down, stay down! Do it!”

The children whimper and mill, and Cassian sweeps them before him.  “In you go, that’s it, get inside!”  Hands grab at him, unhappy voices wail, a mixture of three or four languages he recognises and at least one he doesn’t.  

He repeats his commands, switching from Basic to Hroshori to Alderaanian – there’s a kid from Alderaan here? Force alive! – and shoves the last few children into the drain. Slides after them, blaster in hand.  “Get down!  Hush!  Al-doon-usj, uh, na-menj, hsss…  Baja, cuidado, uh, abaixe-se, shhh…”  Just in time; the din of marching is furiously loud and as he crouches right in the lee of the broken lip of pipe, rank upon rank of white-clad troopers stamp by.  On and on, a whole battalion.  

The children huddle closely round him in the dark and the running filth, blessedly silent.  When he looks round he can see a dozen pairs of eyes looking up at him.  At last the soldiers are gone.  But he daren’t let the kids just run back into the street, straight back into danger.  Not when he could get them off-planet.  There’s nothing for it.

“Come on, this way.  I’ll get you out of here.  Vamos, si-is-esj, estoy con vosotros…”

He leads them into the darkness, the long dank midnight way home.

**

The filthy tunnel finally debouches into daylight, and they emerge in the mouth of a storm-drain, on a slope above a polluted riverbed.  Cassian looks cautiously around and a huge relief washes through him as he sees they’re well outside the city. 

The walk in the dark has been long and slow, and hard going for little legs.  He’d stopped to count the children at intervals, terrified that someone would fall behind and be lost.  But they’ve all stayed together, somehow, though in the end he’s had to carry the smallest one after she fell headlong in the sludge and came up with a deep, bloody gash in her calf.

He has nothing to clean the wound, but the bleeding has slowed, and she hangs on, skinny little arms tight round his neck, and doesn’t cry once.  No child should be so afraid that they don’t shed a tear even when they’re bleeding.  Cassian knows that much about children (and he remembers sitting in silence, dry-eyed, so many times; watching a funeral pyre, seeing a home collapse under bombardment, feeling his flesh scream though his throat would not as a glancing blaster bolt connected with his side.  That much, he _knows_ ).

He sets the injured child down gently and pulls out his comm.  “Kay?  Do you copy?”

“There you are.  I was wondering where you’d got to.  Your signal went dead.”

“I’ve been out of range.  I was in a tunnel.”

“There was a 25% chance that was the reason.  There was also a 41% chance you had turned the unit off to avoid being tracked, and 29% chance you had been captured.  It was however reassuring that the odds of you being already dead were only 5%.  The comm unit would most likely have still have been switched on in that eventuality and –“

“Kay, I don’t need the detailed analysis, thank you.  Can you bring the ship to my coordinates?”

“I _can_ do that.”

He waits, with the link still on, but there’s no background sound of engines starting up.  “Kay, just bring the ship, please?”

A beat.  “I’ll bring the ship.”

“Thank you.”

**

Twelve pairs of eyes, watching his every move.   Twelve worried little mouths, tense and downturned, sad or anxious or open in wonderment.  Twelve thin, bruised, filthy little people, sitting in the hold of a U-wing, waiting for him to say something.

They’re airborne; a few moments of vibration in the hull as the ship breaks atmo, then a faint jolt, and outside the view-port the blackness goes to blue-grey as they leap into the hyperspace lane. 

“Okay.  Okay, we’re safe.”

Twelve pairs of eyes blinking, staring at him.  Nobody makes a sound.

Where on earth is he to start? 

Drinking water; he has plenty of that, at least, though there are only three beakers on board.  He fills all three and gets the children passing them round; refills them and refills them again, and again, until everyone has had some.  Putting the empty two-litrejon back in the locker he notices there’s a pack of cleaning wipes in there. 

He’s pretty sure that at times they’ve been wading through raw sewage, so it won’t hurt to get some of the muck off their hands and faces. 

He shows them how to pull a wipe from the pot and tear it off; scrubs his own hands carefully with the one he’s taken. 

Something to eat, now.  He’s still got a couple of emergency meal packs, and there are some protein bars and quite a lot of portion-bread mix, and the bag of dried fruit rings Jyn had insisted on giving him ( _I know I need the vitamins but I’m **so** sick of the taste, go on, you can take some of them!)._   It won’t be a big meal but it’s enough to make some difference to a dozen hungry tummies.  Cassian turns on the heating unit and gets both meal packs into it to warm up, then unwraps the fruit.  “Who likes dried meiloorun?  Here you are, there’s enough for everyone.  ¿Quien quiere fruta seca? – no, no, hay suficiente, aquí tienes - uh, algum fruto – ah, meiis-nas lasiisjal-esj…”

Twelve pairs of hands reach shyly up to take the food.  Twelve solemn little faces start to eat.

**

“Kay, are you alright to go on flying the ship?”

“I am perfectly capable of piloting continuously until I run out of power or my servos break down.  It would get very boring but there’s no physical reason why I cannot do it.  Do you intend to spend yet more time with the infant sentients?”

“They need someone to look after them, Kay.”

“Most of them would appear to have remained alive without such supervision for some considerable time.”

“And that’s exactly why they need someone with them now.  Just get us home to Hoth, there’s a good fellow?”

Kay swings his head sideways for a moment to fix Cassian with an expressionless stare.  Looks back to the controls.  “Very well.  I’ll be a _good fellow_.  Maintaining current speed and heading.”

Cassian slides back down, into the hold and the circle of worried little faces that all turn up towards him, like daisies fixing on the sun.

“Oh boy…”  He’s still not sure what the fourth language he heard even is.  He’s been translating things steadily into the two main dialects of his out-of-practice Alderaanian, and his bad and very ungrammatical Hroshori, for several hours.  He hopes there’ll be some translation bots back on Hoth.  And places for all these little scraps, in the rough-and-ready childcare facilities on base.  He can’t take them all back to quarters, after all; even if Jyn weren’t about to produce one of their own, there’d still never be room for this many children there. 

“Okay, kids, we’ll be home soon.  Vamos a llegar pronto – em breve – Mins-suij al-ans – no, sorry – al-anfa.  Oh boy…”  The thought of Jyn’s face if he were to turn up a fortnight before her due date and deliver her a dozen orphans for adoption is a pretty picture.  “You know,” he tells them “when we get back, you know what my partner is going to say?  She’s going to go _Oh Cassian, what have you brought home now?_ It’ll be just like in the story…  You know?   _Oh Jacinto, what have you…_?”

Not one child shows so much as a flicker of recognition.

It shouldn’t be the worst thing of all and yet somehow it is.  All the loss and grief he’s known in his life, yet he can remember his Papí reading that story aloud to him as though it were yesterday.  Not one of these little people has heard of it; and he knows it’s still popular because Kay had been talking about classic storybooks just a few weeks ago (and had been thoroughly disgruntled to learn that a new-born wouldn’t be interested in anything but food and sleep).

All these little ones need so much love, so much care; and he has no idea what provision the Alliance will be able to make for them.  It’ll be better than living on the street in occupied Lothal, but it won’t be the families they’ve lost, the real homes they’ve maybe never had.

The littlest ones are getting tired, but he can see they’re fighting it.  It hurts, watching them; they are safe here, but they’re still so scared, so determined to keep their eyes open.  There has to be something more he can do, to soothe them down and make them feel safe.

“Alright, how about a story before bed-time?  If none of you know _Oh Jacinto_ then why don’t I read it to you?…”

It takes just a few minutes for Kay to get past his eye-rolling reaction and locate the right data file.  A few minutes more for Cassian to get the children settled into something approaching comfort.  But when he sits down in their midst and leans his back against the main bench, the two sitting nearest creep closer to him, and gradually the others follow suit.  By the time he’s live-wired his data-pad to the briefing screen and brought up the first picture on-screen, and worked out some rough translations, he’s crowded round with small bodies.

“Here we go.  Just a little story to make you all laugh, and then it’s time to sleep…”  He begins; and suddenly it’s his father’s voice speaking through his, and it’s hard for a second not to sound husky; but he looks around at his audience, and breathes, and reads on.  “Jacinto lived on a quiet little farm, outside a quiet little town, on a quiet little planet, with his mama and papa…”

**Author's Note:**

> So this is an expansion of a drabble I wrote for Cassian Andor Appreciation Week; because that image of Cassian rescuing a gang of street children stayed with me and wanted to be expanded.  
> If anyone is interested, I'd love to turn "Oh Jacinto" into a proper picture book some day!


End file.
